Board of Aldermen 10-13-2020 Page 62
President Wilshire
Director Cummings?
Director Cummings
Yes thank you Madam President. | just want to quickly clarify a few things that were just stated and want to
make an offer again. So this summer, in August | had a meeting with the Infrastructure Committee. | had
Desmond our hired consultant for the parking study give me a quote and | offered that we pull out the
overnight parking issue and treat it as a stand alone item and | got a quote for that and asked the
Infrastructure of there was a desire to pursue that as a stand alone item and the feedback and the
consensus at the time was there really wasn’t much of an appetite to do that. Maybe folks’ opinions have
changed, if folks want to do that. | am more than happy to engage our professional consultant that could
help guide us in best crafting a solution to this problem. They’ve already given me the quote on what it
would cost us if we had an interest in doing that and | am sure we could reactivate that proposal if there
was such an ambition by this body.
In addition to that, | just want to clarify a couple things. One, the Parking Department doesn’t go out and
“target” certain neighborhoods or certain areas that is by no means what they do. And then in addition to
that, the ticketing has pretty much stayed consistent over the years in terms of the amount of volume of
tickets that have been written. So | understand the frustration, I’ve heard some of it. | think the comment
that was made about there’s been “more ticketing happening and it hasn’t been changing the behavior and
now all of a sudden the account is in the positive and not the negative”. What happened is actually the
behavior was occurring and infractions were out there it is just that they weren't getting cited. So they did
start getting cited and so that’s why everyone is starting to hear and talk about this issue, which | agree is
very important.
But depending on where you are in Nashua, there is a different solution for each area. So | think in
downtown there may be one solution. And | think when you are outside of the downtown it may be a
different solution. So one size fits all approach may not be the best way to handle it. So at any rate, I’ve
probably carried on a little too long for this evening on this. But | would just leave everyone with the fact that
if you want to have a conversation about allowing for overnight parking to occur, there’s ways to do it that
will be safer and more sophisticated that will allow for snow removal to occur without any problems, that will
allow for public safety issues to be addressed so there wouldn’t be as many problems as opposed to just
allowing for there to be overnight parking with no controls in place. So thank you.
President Wilshire
Thank you Director Cummings. Alderman Clemons?
Alderman Clemons
Thank you. | agree with most of what Alderman Lopez said, in particular the fact that we, that regardless of
a study we are elected as Aldermen to know what is going on in our constituent’s lives and they come to us
with issues and it is our responsibility to see if we can come up with a solution. So in the sense of if you
wanted to add, regardless of whatever parking study said, if you know that there is a street that the
overnight parking program should be added, then we should be addressing that and not waiting for a
parking study because it is just common sense. And so in that regard | agree with Alderman Lopez in that
we need to look at different approaches and we can’t keep holding things up in Committee and that kind of
stuff.
On the other hand though | disagree in the sense that this is exactly why this legislation should go back to
committee so that we can have a better conversation. So while | agree with most of what was said, | do not
agree with this moving forward. | think that would be a mistake. | think that there are too many issues here
and we should move this back to committee. Thank you.
